New York, NY — October 28, 2025 — Voyant Photonics, a pioneer in on-chip Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) LiDAR, today announced the appointment of Clément Nouvel as Chief Executive Officer. Nouvel joins at a pivotal stage as the company transitions from development to large-scale commercialization of its silicon photonics based sensing technology, enabling machines to autonomously perceive and understand their environments with millimeter precision demanded by the emerging era of Physical AI.
A Proven Leader in LiDAR Innovation
Nouvel has nearly a decade of LiDAR and automotive sensing experience from Valeo, where he led multiple initiatives from Business Development through R&D and production. Having witnessed the scalability challenges of traditional LiDAR systems firsthand, he now brings his deep technical insight and operational expertise to a company poised to redefine active sensing.
“LiDAR enabled the first wave of autonomous vehicles,” said Clément Nouvel, Chief Executive Officer of Voyant. “Voyant’s on-chip FMCW technology will enable the second wave – autonomous everything. But the challenges are multiple, and purpose-built solutions are required. The era of Physical AI demands sensing that’s not just accurate, but scalable, affordable, and ready to deploy across thousands of applications in diverse operating environments. At Voyant, we are building the core technology that will enable these applications.”
Nouvel’s leadership marks a new chapter for Voyant, signaling the company’s shift from an R&D-driven startup to a deployment-ready technology platform designed for real-world adoption across multiple industries. While early LiDAR innovation focused on vehicles, Voyant’s mission is broader: to bring spatial awareness to all machines that interact with the physical world. Applications range from factory and warehouse robots to drones, smart infrastructure, and wearable AR devices.
Why This Moment Matters: The Physical AI Opportunity
Artificial intelligence has made extraordinary leaps in reasoning and perception, yet machines still rely on limited, often costly and bulky, sensing systems. As autonomous systems proliferate across manufacturing, logistics, robotics, infrastructure, and mobility, the need for scalable, high-quality spatial data is becoming the defining challenge.
As the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds blur, Voyant’s on-chip LiDAR enables machines not just to see, but to understand motion, depth, and context, which is foundational for the next generation of intelligent systems.
“Intelligence without high-quality spatial data is incomplete,” said Nouvel. “The limiting factor isn’t AI itself; it’s what AI can make sense of. We need systems that can leverage the reasoning power of AI by providing them with more data for depth, velocity, and precision.”
Voyant’s Differentiators: LiDAR Reimagined on Silicon for Chip-scale Economics
Today’s LiDAR systems are typically large, expensive, and difficult to scale. By contrast, Voyant’s fully integrated on-chip approach delivers a breakthrough in sensing performance and scalability with chip-scale economics reminiscent of other application areas such as image sensors, GPUs, and GPS. Key to this performance and scaling are:
The company has demonstrated silicon performance and yield with its initial Carbon products and will be delivering the first of its solutions in 2026. Initial pricing places it well below competing offerings, with pricing starting at $1490/unit.
About Voyant Photonics
Voyant Photonics is pioneering the future of 3D sensing with its breakthrough on-chip FMCW LiDAR technology. Built on a silicon photonics platform, Voyant’s LiDAR delivers precision depth and velocity data in a compact, scalable, and cost-effective form factor. Headquartered in New York, the company’s vision is to make advanced perception as ubiquitous and affordable as camera sensors — empowering the Physical AI era across industries and applications.
For more information, contact:
Nicolas Baroan Mike Sottak
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+33 6 28 21 74 45 +1 650 248 9597
